Fellows 2010/2011

Dr. Renu Addlakha

is a senior fellow at the Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi (India). She did her doctoral research on the psychiatric profession in India with particular reference to the treatment of women. She is a feminist scholar whose areas of specialization include the sociology of medicine, mental illness and the psychiatric profession, the anthropology of infectious diseases as well as bioethics and disability studies.

Her current project focuses on the multiple intersections between disability, work and gender in contemporary India from a largely social-anthropological perspective. Work as viewed from a life cycle perspective is a critical component of her research on gender and disability. She has examined in great detail the work and career aspirations of young disabled persons in New Delhi at both school and university levels. These include students in special schools, general schools and school dropouts. In following up on the careers of certain of her subjects, she has also interviewed a large number of disabled persons who are employees or self-employed. The resulting data-set comprises a large number of interviews with men and women whose handicaps cover the major categories of disability. In her research sample she has attempted to incorporate not only different caste groups but a wide range of age and occupational categories, ranging from college teachers to roadside vendors to housewives and students. Comparing the aspirations of young people of both genders for career advancement and social mobility with the actual experiences of those seeking market integration and surviving in a non-disabled work environment makes for a thought-provoking commentary on the contemporary neo-liberal Indian economic system and its socio-cultural realities. A multi-layered comparative perspective is the central methodological approach of her research.

Publications

‘Gendered Constructions of Work and Disability in Contemporary India. Discursive and Empirical Perspectives’. In Disability, Gender, and the Trajectories of Power, edited by Asha Hans, 2016–2237. New Delhi: SAGE, 2015.

‘Discursive and Institutional Intersections. Women, Health and Law in Modern India’. International Review of Sociology 24, no. 3 (2014): 488–502.

‘Gender Blind or Gender Biased? Culture, Family and Patriarchy in Indian Psychiatry’. In Restoring Mental Health in India. Pluralistic Therapies and Concepts, edited by Brigitte Śebastia, 253–84. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Professor Ravi Ahuja

teaches South Asian social and economic history since the eighteenth century. On gaining his PhD at Heidelberg University, he taught and conducted research in Berlin (Humboldt University and Center for Modern Oriental Studies) and Heidelberg (South Asia Institute). His “habilitation” at the University of Hanover preceded an appointment as Professor of Modern South Asian History at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. In 2009 he accepted the offer to co-found a new Center for Modern Indian Studies (CeMIS) in Göttingen. His research has focused on urban history and on the social history of labor, infrastructure and war.

At the International Research Center, Ravi Ahuja will draw upon his earlier studies on Indian maritime labor to analyze elementary aspects of the historical formation and regulation of the labor market in modern South Asia. He proceeds from the hypothesis that the social formation, differentiation, regulation and reproduction of industrial labor markets occur on three crucial and interrelated scales: (a) life cycle configurations, (b) conventionalized household and community strategies and (c) formalized, legally sanctioned institutional structures.

Dr. Dmitri van den Bersselaar

teaches African history at the University of Liverpool. His research to date has explored a range of topics in the cultural and social history of Ghana and Nigeria, including work and migration, occupational and ethnic identity in Nigeria, the incorporation of imported commodities into West African culture, the collecting of African objects in Britain, knowledge production about Africa by missionaries and colonial agents, and the various legacies of the Atlantic slave trade. He has worked on projects with the World Museum Liverpool, Unilever PLC, the Jenevermuseum, the International Slavery Museum, and the Liverpool Tate Gallery.

At the International Research Center, Dmitri van den Bersselaar will be examining the careers of African employees of the United Africa Company (UAC), a large European business operating in West Africa. UAC employed thousands of West Africans in functions ranging from laborers and clerks to managers and directors, and across a diverse set of enterprises that included general trading, beer brewing, vehicle assembly, transportation, and advertising. How these Africans were recruited, what career paths they followed, why they decided to either remain with the company or leave, and what careers they had after leaving the company, are all explored in this project.

Publications

Bersselaar, Dmitri van den. 2005. “Imagining Home. Migration and the Igbo Village in Colonial Nigeria.” The Journal of African History 46 (1): 51–73.

Bersselaar, Dmitri van den. 2011a. “‘Doorway to Success?’ Reconstructing African Careers in European Business from Company House Magazines and Oral History Interviews.” History in Africa 38 (1): 257–94.

Bersselaar, Dmitri van den. 2011c. “Race, Slavery and Imperialism. Knowledge Production and Personhood.” In Race and the Civilizing Mission. The Impliations for the Framing of Blackness and African Personhood, edited by Waibinte E. Wariboko, 83–102.

Dr. Manuela Ciotti

is a social anthropologist with a PhD from the London School of Economics. She has carried out several years of fieldwork in north India, mainly with Dalit (‘former untouchable’) communities. Drawing on this research, she has published several articles in leading journals on topics ranging from education, labor ethnohistory, gender, youth, class, and women’s activism in party politics.

Her long-standing interest in Dalits has inspired a trilogy of essays reflecting on the use of the Dalit category, the politics of experience, and representation, as well as a reader bringing together over thirty of the most significant contributions to the study of the aforementioned communities. Both sets of publications are currently in preparation. Moreover, her focus on South Asian Studies is intertwined with her interest in the nexus between anthropological epistemology, transnationality and a politics of cultural difference. A monograph provisionally titled ‘ Producing Knowledge in Late Modernity: Lessons from India’ is also in preparation.

Her project at the International Research Center focuses on shifting patterns and meanings of work and non-work amongst Dalit male youth in India. Where lifecycle patterns amongst Dalits have historically been marked by illiteracy and manual labor, Dalit young men’s presence within educational institutions and the employment market within India’s fast-growing economy signals the birth of a new historical subject. Against this backdrop, the relation between work and non-work among Dalit youth is analyzed through the lens of the notion of social justice – emerging from the struggle against caste discrimination and affirmative action policies – as a particular formation of non-Western modernity.

Publications

Ciotti, Manuela. 2007. “Ethnohistories Behind Local and Global Bazaars. Chronicle of a Chamar Weaving Community in the Banaras Region.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 41 (3): 321–54.

Ciotti, Manuela. 2011a. “After Subversion. Intimate Encounters, the Agency in and of Representation, and the Unfinished Project of Gender Without Sexuality in India.” Cultural Dynamics 23 (2): 107–26.

Ciotti, Manuela. 2011c. “Resurrecting Seva (Social Service). Dalit and Low-caste Women Party Activists as Producers and Consumers of Political Culture and Practice in Urban North India.” The Journal of Asian Studies 71 (01): 149–70. doi:10.1017/S002191181100297X.

Ciotti, Manuela. 2014. “Dalit Women Between Social and Analytical Alterity. Rethinking the ‘Quintessentially Marginal’.” In Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, edited by Leela Fernandes. Routledge.

teaches social and economic history at the University of Vienna. Before this he was professor for late-modern history at the University of Salzburg. Guest professorships took him to, among other places, the Free University Berlin, the European University Institute in Florence, and the University of Cambridge. His research encompasses the broad spectrum of European social history from the early modern period to the present day, some of his topics being work and the worker, the family and aging, historical demography and migration.

At the International Research Center, Josef Ehmer will be attempting to conceptually correlate two long historical trends – the increasingly late entry of young people into the field of gainful employment, and the increasingly early retirement of older individuals from the work world. Both trends have been well documented worldwide, but they have neither been sufficiently explained nor examined from a comparative perspective. Josef Ehmer is particularly interested in the interaction between three continuously changing factors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – the structure of employment markets, the preferences of actors in terms of work and leisure time, and the alternatives to gainful employment through educational systems for younger people, pension systems for older individuals and family and domestic work for women.

Publications

Ehmer, Josef. 2010. ‘Discourses on Work and Labour in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Germany’. In Work in a Modern Society. The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective, edited by Jürgen Kocka, 17–36. New York: Berghahn Books.

Professor Anne Griffiths

holds a personal chair in the Anthropology of Law at the School of Law at Edinburgh University. Her research focuses on the anthropology of law, comparative and family law, African law, gender, culture and rights. Her most recent research project involves a study of the gendered dynamics of land tenure in Africa (2009-2010), which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Over the years she has held visiting appointments at various institutions including Distinguished Visiting Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany; International Institute for the Sociology of Law, Onati-Gipuzkoa, Sapin; University of Texas School of Law; and the Southern and Eastern African Regional Centre for Women's Law at the University of Zimbabwe. She is currently on the executive board (and former president of) the Commission on Legal Pluralism, a branch of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.

Publications

Griffiths, Anne. 2011a. ‘Delivering Justice. The Changing Gendered Dynamics of Land Tenure in Botswana’. The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 63: 231–62.

Griffiths, Anne. 2011b. ‘The Changing Dynamics of Customary Land Tenure. Women’s Access to and Control Over Land in Botswana’. Acta Juridica: 83–113.

Griffiths, Anne. 2013b. ‘Re-Envisioning the Local. Spatiality, Land and Law in Botswana’. International Journal of Law in Context 9 (02): 213–38.

Griffiths, Anne. 2014. “Engaging with the Global. Perspectives on Land from Botswana.” In Framing the Global. Entry Points for Research, edited by Hilary E. Kahn, 112–36. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Dr. Ralf Grötker

is a journalist and a science writer for economic and social research. He studied philosophy and cultural studies in Bremen, Paris and Cologne and received his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on the limits of the rational reconstruction of moral views.

He writes for the economics magazine brand eins, for the German edition of the MIT journal Technology Review, among other periodicals, and his articles address topics such as the phenomenon of clever average, how adherents of the unbridled market economy imagine an ethical capitalism, and the question as to whether the expansion of voluntary engagement can serve as an indicator that individuals might be prepared to work without wages.

At the International Research Center, Ralf Grötker will be involved in three sub-projects: (a) a merit-based theory of income-distribution justice, i.e. the relationship between wages and one’s social contribution; (b) a micro-economic investigation of the development of wage levels using the example of the professional field of “journalism”; (c ) the proposal to replace the payroll tax with a consumer tax in order to reduce labor costs in Germany and thereby making attractive but presently non-cost efficient occupations (“good work”) once more accessible to employees.

Professor Sandrine Kott

has taught the history of contemporary Europe at the Université de Genève since 2004. She carried out her studies in Paris, was an assistant professor at the Université de Poitiers and is a member of the Institut universitaire de France. She has had residencies at Bielefeld, Berlin, Princeton/New York and Santa Barbara. Her principal fields of expertise are the history of social welfare and labor law in France and Germany since the end of the nineteenth century and labor relations in those countries of real socialism, in particular in the German Democratic Republic. Ever since her appointment to the Université de Genève, Sandrine Kott has developed the transnational and global dimensions of each of her fields of expertise in utilizing the archives and resources of international organizations and particularly the International Labor Organization.

At the International Research Center she is working on a project which is at the intersection of three other projects: Work in the Cold War: Circulations, Convergences and Divergences between Two Economic and Social Models. The project is an inquiry into the way in which, between 1947 and 1970, the International Labor Organization was able to function as a sphere of exchange between the models of modernity of advanced capitalist countries and those of real socialism. The goal of this project is twofold. Using the concept of “work”, it throws into question the very notions of “Cold War” and “Iron Curtain” as well as bringing to light both the discrepancies and the traffic and convergences of these two parts of the Western world issuing from the same modernity; and the project is an attempt to nurture reflection on the structuring role of salaried work for Western societies, both capitalists and socialist, as well as for those people who live in these societies

Professor Nicole Mayer-Ahuja

is at the Institute for Sociology at the Universität Göttingen. She is a sociologist and undertakes her research from a historical and transnational perspective. Her focus is on the tension created by the conflicting priorities of the entrepreneurial strategies of capitalism and the economic, political and social regulation of the production and reproduction of manpower. She has published work on mass unemployment in the Great Depression, on the history of casualization in the German Federal Republic since 1973, how Internet service providers organize their labor, and German-Indian project work in the software sector.

At the International Research Center, Nicole Mayer-Ahuja will be widening the sphere of her research. Informing her analysis is the notion that sociological studies of labor are mostly little snapshots in time. But (re)production of the workforce encompasses the entire lifecycle and even beyond because manpower is (re)produced not only on a daily basis but within the framework of an individual’s biography as a whole and even in a transgenerational sense. What short and long-term goals bind individuals to their current occupations? On what part of their biography did these occupations actually left their mark – and what does this say about the contradictory standardization of gainful employment? To what degree does a certain activity permit the securing of workforce (re)production over several generations – does it enable the establishment of a family or support of the elderly, or is it “subsidized” through older generations? At what point in their biography do the gainfully employed in transnational companies throughout various parts of the world meet up with one another – and what kind of interactions and interdependencies emerge from these certain age constellations, personnel placement strategies, and workforce (re)production? In order to answer these questions, the uses to which manpower is put in the here and now must be placed in a wider perspective and with a view to the variegated interconnections among diverse lifecycles. The first attempts to answer such questions will be undertaken within the framework of the fellowship.

with Patrick Feuerstein. ‘Jack of All Trades and Master of None? The Development of IT (Compatible) Qualification between State, Company, and Individual Career Planning’. In Critical Perspectives on Work and Employment in Globalizing India, edited by Ernesto Noronha and Premilla D’Cruz, 153–72. Singapore: Springer, 2017.

Professor Prabhu P. Mohapatra

teaches economic and social history at the University of Delhi. He has been, at various times, a research fellow and visiting professor at Yale University, at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London), at the University of Cambridge, at the University of Amsterdam, at the University of Leiden, and at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris). His research has been on agrarian history, transnational labor history, the history of labor regulation in South Asia, global migration history, and the economic and social history of modern South Asia.

He has published on these topics in journals such as the International Review of Social History, the Indian Economic and Social History Review, Studies in History, and in several edited volumes.

His project at the International Research Center focuses on indentured Indian labor on Caribbean sugar plantations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the years nearly half a million Indian laborers were shipped to work on the erstwhile slave plantations in the Caribbean colonies. Prabhu Mohapatra’s aim in this project is to delineate the way the experience of indenture was played out along three axes: the individual lifecycle, the community formation process, and the shifting plane of the labor regime. Theoretically pitted against the dominant paradigms of migration studies, his work explores the problem posed by interaction of the indenture system with the human lifecycle at both the individual and collective level. This approach will hopefully provide a fruitful method for escaping the bind of free/unfree labor and the cultural persistence/assimilation dichotomies that characterize migration studies. The lifecycle approach will also aid in understanding both the structural replication and structural transformation of the experience of migrant indentured servitude.

Publications

with Chitra Joshi, and Rana P. Behal. ‘Dialogues across Borders. Marcel van Der Linden and the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH)’. In On the Road to Global Labour History. A Festschrift for Marcel van der Linden, edited by Karl Heinz Roth. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

‘“Following Custom”? Representations of Community among Indian Immigrant Labour in the West Indies, 1880–1920’. International Review of Social History 51, no. S14 (2006): 173–202.

‘The Hosay Massacre of 1884. Class and Community Among Indian Immigrant Labourers in Trinidad’. In Work and Social Change in Asia. Essays in Honour of Jan Breman, edited by Arvind N. Das and Marcel van der Linden, 187–230. New Delhi: Manohar, 2003.

with Rana P. Behal. ‘“Tea and Money versus Human Life.” The Rise and Fall of the Indenture System in the Assam Tea Plantations 1840–1908’. Journal of Peasant Studies 19, no. 3–4 (1992): 142–72.

has been professor for modern and contemporary history at the Universität Trier since 1996. He was a visiting professor at the EHESS and the University of Paris VII-Denis Didérot. He is a member of the working group for modern social history and of the Academic Commission of the Academic Council.

At the International Research Center, Lutz Raphael will research the impact of the upheavals in Western European industry on the workforce after changes in generation-specific models of professional biographies, opportunities for advancement, and class affiliation between 1975 and 2000. Research in this regard will also be undertaken as to the change in cultural and political (self)representations in the three countries with which a comparison will be drawn – Germany, Great Britain, and France.

Publications

Raphael, Lutz. 2011a. “‚Experiments in Modernization‘. Social and Economic History in Europe and the United States, 1880-1940.” In The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 1800-1945, edited by Stuart Macintyre, Juan Maiguashca, and Attila Pók, 4:98–114. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Professor David Warren Sabean

is Henry J. Bruman Endowed Professor of German History at the University of California at Los Angeles. A graduate of the University of

Wisconsin where he studied under George Mosse, Sabean has taught at the University of East Anglia, University of Pittsburgh and Cornell University, and he has been a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, the American Academy in Berlin, and the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. He has been recipient of an Alexander Humboldt Foundation Research Prize and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been working around issues of work and the human lifecycle since the late 1970s. Most of his early research was oriented to village and rural life, and in the first volume of his study of the Württemberg village of Neckarhausen he worked on shifts in occupation over the lifecycle, partly as a function of property accumulation. He also examined the place of work in the family lifecycle, paying particular attention to familial conflicts (between spouses and between generations), and closely analyzing the way that new forms of agricultural production altered the sexual division of labor and reconfigured the moments of stress in family life. He concentrated on patterns of separation and divorce as they were related to the productive activities of farming and artisanal families and as they occurred over the course of a marriage. He was particularly concerned with work rhythms and the details of work processes as they were carried out by different members of the family according to age, rank and gender.

The village study offered the opportunity to model changes in kinship relationships over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for property-holding groups in general. In the conclusion to Kinship in Neckarhausen, 1700-1870, he dealt largely with the German middle classes during the nineteenth century. His work so far suggests three areas of comparative social history that he would like to explore during 2010-11 by examining nineteenth-century German middle-class autobiographies: the meaning and usefulness of kinship networks over the course of one’s life; the self-understanding of work in terms of career patterns and occupational identity; the international distribution of many German families during the nineteenth century as well as the distribution of work roles.

Publications

with Christopher Howard Johnson, eds. Blood and Kinship. Matter for Metaphor from Ancient Rome to the Present. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2013.

with David Martin Luebke, Jared Poley, and Daniel C. Ryan, eds. Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2012.

with Malina Stefanovska, eds. Space and Self in Early Modern European Cultures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012.

with Christopher H Johnson, eds. Sibling Relations and the Transformations of European Kinship, 1300-1900. New York, NY: Berghahn, 2011.

with Simon Teuscher, and Jon Mathieu, eds. Kinship in Europe. Approaches to Long-Term Development (1300-1900). New York, NY: Berghahn, 2010.

Dr. Mani Shekhar Singh

has worked extensively in the field of art and visual culture. His research on the pictorial practices of women painters of the Mithila region in the eastern region of India resulted in a doctoral thesis entitled Folk Art, Identity and Performance: A Sociological Study of Maithil Painting at the University of Delhi. He has taught at the New School for Social Research, New York, and in the Department of Sociology at the University of Delhi. He has published in several edited volumes and journals. He has received several fellowships and awards, which include Directeur d’Etudes Associé, Foundation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris (2010),the New India Foundation Fellowhip (2008-2009), the Rockefeller Fellowship at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (2005-6), India Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2002-2004), and the German Volkswagen Foundation and University of Heidelberg Fellowship (2002-2003). At present he is working on his book Changing with Times: Mithila Artists and Their Pictorial Practice. His areas of research interest include visual anthropology, folk painting, political cartoons and posters and children’s art.

His current research project on women artists in rural eastern India interrogates the conventional distinctions drawn between economic labor, the realm of ritual or cultural processes, and aesthetic production. It describes changes in iconography, production techniques and work rhythms, familial/caste organization of work and domestic work spaces, the shift from training within the home to formal pedagogic institutions, and the politics of representation and meaning as objects of art circulating over diverse sites: ritual and non-ritual as well as domestic and public spaces (such as museums and exhibitions). These issues are tied to growing state patronage and integration of these artistic products into national and global metropolitan art markets since the early 1970s.

Publications

Folk Art Enters the World. Maithil Painting from Village to Nation and Beyond. Delhi: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

‘Making Claims to Tradition. Poetics and Politics in the Works of Young Maithil Painters’. In Wording the World. Veena Das and Scenes of Inheritance, edited by Roma Chatterji, 318–46. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015.